Abortion, and of course the wider issue of reproductive rights, still seems to be an area that the left need to be pushed on.

Yeah they will often make the right noises, but they will make excuses for anti abortion men such as Galloway, and yet I can’t see them being quite so tolerant if someone was, ooh let’s say pro-war. But abortion is a women’s issue isn’t it, it’s not quite up there with the serious male leftie men and their real politics about war and arguing the toss over the finer obscure theoretical points of Marxism or who did what when to whom in 1983.

That’s not to say the majority of the left aren’t pro choice and I’m not going to bang on about Galloway as it’s pointless. Back to the subject, the left and pro choice, why should they get their finger out on this?

Much has been said on this, so I will try to focus on what I see as specific issues for the left, starting with the fact that working class women are those who lose out the most when abortion rights are restricted. Money has always helped procure such services from discreet private doctors.

Working class women, pre 1967, had to make do with the back street abortionists and the resultant risks to health, potentially fatal.
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1) On March 19th Nadine Dorries MP published a blog-post titled The Hand of Hope, which featured this image of a small hand apparently coming out of a uterus. She said:

When the operation was over, baby Samuel, at 21 weeks gestation, put his hand through the incision in the uterus and grabbed hold of the surgeon’s finger, a gesture which was apparently met with a huge amount of emotion in the operating theatre. Dr Bruner said that it was the most emotional moment of his life and that for a moment he was just frozen, totally immobile.

Except, it was a hoax and Dr Bruner himself had said so. This was pointed out on several blogs including LC and Dorries wrote another post defending her actions with the view that the photographer, a born-again Christian, should be believed over the surgeon (who she had earlier quoted herself).

The Hand of Hope also makes an appearance on the pictures and video section of her new campaign. In other words, a member of parliament is actually perpetuating a hoax that has been debunked several times.

In many ways, this sums up her entire campaign.
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Today on Liberal Conspiracy we have a treat for you. This week we officially launch our campaign: Coalition For Choice, to support the HFE Bill and develop an online advocacy group in favour of extending abortion rights over the longer term.

See the website for more about our aims.

To mark this launch we have a week of Nadine Dorries MP on Liberal Conspiracy! We will illustrate how this Conservative MP:
- has consistently misrepresented the arguments around abortion;
- is fronting campaigns by Christian groups without declaring so;
- is promoting hoaxes on her websites;
- has frequently and wrongly smeared reputable journalists and scientists;
- hides her true long-term intentions on the issue of abortion
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So David Cameron the political shape-shifter, just like Odo from Deep Space Nine but with less humanity, is spinning away the true nature of the Tory Party again today.

This seems to be his main tactic - either lie about what your party believes in, ignore anything your party may have believed in the past, or preferably believe nothing at all.
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Compass put on a sizzling debate last night on Labour’s future direction. Two contributions in particular stood out- those of Steve Richards and a devastating but completely constructive contribution by Jon Cruddas. Actually, I left the meeting feeling that if we don’t win the next election it won’t be because we lack ideas, conviction or talent.

First to Cruddas’ contribution. He counselled that the Conservatives have changed, not just in terms of style but in terms of philosophy as well and Labour underestimates that at its peril. Moreover, and anyone who followed the London Mayoral elections can vouch for this, they have adopted a new emotionalism to their political language. Labour’s language by contrast is managerial and aloof.
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In the pages of the Daily Mail yesterday, anti-choice poster-girl Nadine Dorries MP was given a platform to put across her misogynist, reactionary views.

She and a claimed ‘coalition of 200′ MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.
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(I was asked to give a speech, yesterday, at the Housmans Bookshop in London. This is an extract from what I said)

A sea-change is taking place in contemporary feminism, particularly in the cities. Feminism is moving out of the universities and back onto the streets, as women of all backgrounds realise that practical action, class agitation and the rights of ordinary, working women are, and always have been, the future of the movement.

Midway through writing this article on Monday, I had a pregnancy scare. My period was a couple of days late, I was spotting but not cramping, I was off my food… I panicked.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I would want to terminate the pregnancy, and that meant a litmus test for my socialism: should I spend my limited savings, money that could be going towards vital schooling, on a quick, safe, private abortion, or should I go through the stress and psycho-physical trauma of asking for an abortion on the NHS?
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Time mag has a brilliant piece on Carme Chacón - Spain’s newest defence minister. The 37 year old is not only the first woman to head Spain’s armed forces, she is also seven months pregnant. The Spanish are leading the way in gender equality.

Maths prodigy Sufih Yusof outed herself last week as the latest girl-genius to hang up her blue stockings for suspenders and a push-up bra. Sufiah, an Oxbridge scholar at the age of thirteen, sold her story of academic destitution leading to high-class prostitution to several major tabloids after being outed by the News of the World.

The story, of course, is an old favourite just screaming to be partnered with extensive photographs of the economics PhD in various states of graphic undress, brandishing whips and dildos and pull-outs about loving sex with random strangers.
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There are 650 million people with disabilities in the world; four-fifths of them live in the developing world. While much has been done in the developed world to improve the lot of people with disabilities and to bring us closer to equality, we are not there yet; things are that much worse in the developing world.

One year ago yesterday, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was opened for signing. It has been signed by 126 states, including the UK, but only ratified by seventeen: Bangladesh, Croatia, Cuba, El Salvador, Gabon, Guinea, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, San Marino, South Africa and Spain.
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A Times poll published today will show that around 50% of the public support the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos to tackle diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

A poll for The Times reveals today that the contentious medical research enjoys broad public approval, with 50 per cent backing new laws that would permit it and only 30 per cent opposed. The findings undermine claims by critics of the experiments that they enjoy little public support and they will bolster the Government’s attempts to pass the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which begins its passage in the House of Commons next month. MPs of all parties will have a free vote on its provisions for human-animal embryos.
…
The poll finds much greater scepticism about another section of the Bill, which would remove the legal requirement that infertility clinics consider a child’s need for a father before accepting patients for treatment. This reform is opposed by 40 per cent of people, with just 32 per cent in favour, but is popular with voters aged between 18 and 34.

The poll (pdf) shows that Liberal Democrats were the most sympathetic towards lesbian mothers.

The Spectator’s leader contains (at least) two silly claims.

First:

Nobody sane can be opposed to a managed migration system that functions well

Leave aside the fact that a well-functioning managed migration system is just impossible.
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A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.

Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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The HFE Bill is most likely to be passed through parliament without any serious danger of it being shelved. Nevertheless, I think left-liberals need to make more noise in opposition to its critics, particularly from the Catholic Church. And not just on the issue of human-animal hybrid embryo research but also abortion.

So I’m going to start by briefly laying out my position on the bill. I’m working to launch a more concerted campaign so I’d be interested in hearing what readers have to say.
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Tomato Lichy can’t hear. He has a partner and a child who can’t hear either. Anyone would say that this is picture perfect, even if it is a very silent picture. So what’s the problem? Well, now they’ve decided that they’d rather any more children they have can’t hear either.

They, along with other people who can’t hear, like Cathy Hefferman, claim that not being able to hear is not a disability. They see themselves as part of a linguistic minority, and they are proud to speak Sign Language.
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I’m holding fire on the oath swearing nonsense. I mean, if you think that’s bad how about a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, a Green Paper on which is apparently due in the next few months.

This Bill will set out the rights we enjoy and the responsibilities we owe as members of society.

A Bill of Rights is a constitutional document. Constitutions can be more or less permissive in the rights they afford the citizen. Most have a mechanism by which more rights can be added, or which override previously accepted rights. Offhand, I can’t think of a constitution which sets out obligations to the state as a basic condition of citizenship, on which the enjoyment of rights is conditional.
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As the Media Guardian reports this morning, John Kampfner has resigned as editor of the New Statesman. Sue Matthias, deputy editor, has taken over for now.

Sky News reports that she will “take charge… until a successor… is found.” This prompts Louise at F-Word to remark: “Because, of course, Ms Matthias can’t be considered a successor despite her years of experience at the New Statesman, Independent and AOL News, can she?” Is there an inherent assumption here that a woman cannot possibly be editor of a serious political weekly?

As regular readers of this site will know, I’ve been following the story of the Fremantle Trust careworkers who spent much of 2007 striking against the harsh pay and leave cuts a new Trust contract forced on them in April. The dispute is unresolved.

Part one of this series.

A year’s a long while to fight your employer. Sandra Jones, a careworker at the Fremantle Trust’s Rosa Freedman day centre, says there are days now when she wonders if there’s much point to it. She will “keep on with the fight, because you have to keep fighting,” but she doubts that Fremantle will budge. “Fremantle doesn’t give a shit about its staff. It’s gone on for so long now. They [the careworkers] are so demoralised. Some people have depression and stress.”

One thing everybody is specially stressed about is Barnet Council’s recent announcement that it plans to terminate part of the lease at the Rosa Freedman home - that’s the carehome that Jones works at.

Fremantle says it will move residents in that home into residential care elsewhere. Careworkers say families of residents at the carehome are extremely unhappy about the transfer, because of the effect that being dragged out of one home into another will have on their elderly relatives.
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David Nowak – a 16-year old kid with the street name ‘Turk’ or ‘TK’ – fell victim to a knife killing in the playground across the road from my apartment block shortly before Christmas. Another teenage gang fight, apparently. Same thing happened to some other boy a couple of blocks away only a few months previously. Shrugs shoulders.

Three young men in the same age group - pictured right - were yesterday jailed for life for the murder of Garry Newlove, kicked to death outside his Warrington home in August last year after remonstrating with them for damaging his wife’s car. They were drunk and spliffed up at the time of the crime; Teenage Kicks, 2007 remix.

Meanwhile, one of today’s top stories in the British media is the controversy over ‘the Mosquito’, a device that prevents young people congregating in public places by emitting a high-pitched noise audible only to those aged under 25. The Children’s Commissioner for England and human rights group Liberty want it banned.

Violent or otherwise unruly behaviour on the part of youth is a real issue for working class communities, in inner cities and smaller towns alike. It is also one that many on the left – I’ll include myself here – feel instinctively uncertain about tackling.

The difficulty is avoiding the twin dangers of coming on like either a ‘Gee, Officer Krupke‘ parody or some deranged love child of David Blunkett and Melanie Phillips, manically demanding the return of the birch.

Yes, we can always advance a standard radical sociology critique. Of course these kids – socially formed under Labour governments, let us underline – are both products of the society around us and obviously deeply alienated from it.

Yes, some of the blame for teenage binge drinking surely lies with the directors of the giant booze companies that endlessly seek out new ways to encourage young people to guzzle their products, from ever-tackier sugar-filled alcopops to expensive advertising and promotional giveaway campaigns.

And no, the iniquities of ASBOs and the de facto return of the sus law – to which I was regularly subjected as a council estate teenager myself – don’t seem to have solved the problem, either.

I can’t honestly say that I know the answers. But if socialists ever want to be taken seriously be the people at the sharp end of this one, we need either to put forward some joined-up social policy thinking or risk leaving the field to the demagogues of all parties. After all, it’s not kids in Belgravia or the posh bits of Cheshire and Surrey that are doing the dying.
* Cross-posted from Dave’s Part

An interesting meme to identify class privilege has been doing the rounds of the US blogs. Originally designed to make university students think about how class impacts them, the meme requires you to tick off items such as “had more than 50 books in your childhood home” and “you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family”.

In some ways, this list is probably insufficient to reflect our particular class system in the UK (perhaps someone will be inspired to write one specific to us). But at the same time, it is still a useful exercise. You can find the full list at Social Class & Quakers, the blog which seems to have kicked off this meme.

At the same time, these privilege lists are not a new idea - Barry Deutsch has compiled a list of these lists ranging from white privilege to non-trans privilege. Deutsch’s has also added his own take on this idea - the male privilege check list, which my fellow F Word blogger Louise has reminded me of this morning. (Number 14 - “my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true” - might be of particular interest to some of the commenters on Gracchi’s post earlier this week).

Feel free to experiment with these memes in the comments section.